About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

26 September 2015

'Desire'

Back in 1986, the Acting Company commissioned seven diverse
playwrights to compose adaptations of short stories by Anton Chekhov. Produced at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in
April and May that year, some of the seven plays in Orchards hoved closely to their sources,
others took a more liberal perspective, and one or two ignored their Chekhovian
origin entirely. (In 1997/98, the Acting
Company used the same strategy—commissioning a diverse team of eminent
playwrights—to create an evening of plays and music inspired by Shakespeare’s
sonnets entitled Love’s Fire.) Well, now the same company has turned to
Tennessee Williams (1911-83), another great playwright and short story-writer,
in the same vein. Presented as the second
entry in the 2015-16 5A Season at the 59E59 Theaters, Desire comprises six short plays adapted by six very different
authors from Williams stories published between 1939 and 1980.

59E59’s 5A Season, its mainstage presentation, encompasses
five full productions in Theater A (hence the name) on the first floor of the
East 59th Street home. Desire, which runs from 2 September to
10 October and opened to the press on 10 September, is considered a world
première even though it was workshopped over four days in July at Vassar
College’s Powerhouse Theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, home of New York
Stage and Film. Diana, my frequent
theater companion—this show was actually her idea, and it turned out to be a
mighty good one—saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 18 September. (My report on “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,”
posted on 12 August, includes a brief background on the 59E59 Theaters.)

Founded in 1972 by producer/director/actor John Houseman, who was the first director of
Juilliard’s Drama Division (founded in 1968), and Margot Harley with members of the
program’s first graduating class, the Acting Company promotes theater by
touring across the U.S. with a repertory of classics and new works
performed by young actors and teaching artists.
It concentrates on communities where live performance and theater arts education
are limited. The company has now
expanded beyond Juilliard graduates, auditioning actors from all over the
country. Each year, the Acting Company
performs in over 40 cities to 70,000 theatergoers and provides arts education to
more than 30,000 students. According to
its own website, the company has presented 141 productions of classic,
contemporary, and new plays to over three million spectators in 48 states
and ten foreign countries.

The Acting Company has received critical acclaim nationally.
In 2003, it was awarded a TONY for Excellence in Theater and the company has
won many other awards such as Obies, AUDELCOS (to honor excellence in New
York African American Theatre) and the Los Angeles Critics Circle
Award. The company has a record of fostering
new works for the stage based on classic literature long before Desire, including Love’s Fire; The
Robber Bridegroom by Alfred
Uhry (1975, based on a 1942 novel by Eurdora Welty); Orchards;
and Rebecca Gilman’s 2005 adaptation
of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers
(coincidentally, a close friend of Tennessee Williams). Some of the illustrious alumni of the Acting Company include Dennis Boutsikaris,
Frances Conroy, Keith David, Dann Florek, Harriet Harris, Kevin Kline,
Hamish Linklater, Patti LuPone, Jesse L. Martin, Randle Mell, Andrew Prosky, David
Schramm, David Ogden Stiers, Lorraine Toussaint, Rainn Wilson, and Jeffrey
Wright.

(Acting Company alums Megan Bartle, Liv Rooth, John Skelley,
Derek Smith, and Yaegel T. Welch appear in Desire. A side note about Smith: his was the only cast
name I recognized before reading the program; I’d seen Juliet Brett and Yaegel
T. Welch as Bonnie in A. R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer and Jonathan in Athol
Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver
Creek, respectively—see my reports on 28 June and 3 July—but I didn’t know
that until I read their bios. As it
happens, I saw Smith, who’s now 55, as Romeo at Washington’s Shakespeare
Theatre in 1986, former Acting Company director Michael Kahn’s first production
as artistic director of STC.)

Subtitled An Evening of Plays Based on Six Stories by
Tennessee Williams, Desire has a
repertory cast of nine directed by Michael Wilson (Horton Foote’s The Orphans Home Cycle
at the Signature Theatre Company, 2009-10—see my report on 25 and 28 February
2010;Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful on Broadway with Cecily
Tyson, 2013) on a unit set. The scenic
and projection design is by Jeff Cowie, the costume design by David C. Woolard,
the lighting design by Russell H. Champa, and the original music and sound
design by John Gromada. The show runs
two-and-a-half hours with one intermission between the third and fourth
plays. Many of Williams’s stories eventually
became the bases of several of his full-length plays, including some of
his best-known works: “The Yellow
Bird” (published in 1967) became Summer and Smoke (1948) and The Eccentricities of a
Nightingale (1964); “One
Arm” (1967), Camino Real
(1953); “Three Players of a Summer Game”(1960), Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955); “The Night of the Iguana” (1967), the
play of the same title (1961); and “Man
Bring This Up Road” (1994), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
(1963). In Desire,
John Guare’s You Lied To Me About
Centralia was adapted from “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (1948), which Williams
used as the foundation of The Glass
Menagerie (1944), his first commercial success. (Short story publication dates are often
later than Williams’s composition of the piece.
Some stories had been unpublished, others appeared in magazines before
being collected into book anthologies.)

The Resemblance
Between a Violin Case and a Coffin (short story published in 1951) by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, 1978, Pulitzer Prize; The Miss
Firecracker Contest, 1979)
is the evening’s most clearly autobiographical tale and Henley kept to the
original storyline and setting.
(Williams was well-known for recycling his biography in his writing. When this story appeared in print, Williams’s
father told his son’s agent, “Tell Tom to keep my family out of his stories.”) It takes place in the 1920s in a small
Mississippi town, (probably the Delta town of Clarksdale, where Williams; his
older sister, Rose; and their mother, Miss Edwina, lived in that era with
Williams’s grandfather, the Rev. Walter Dakin, and grandmother, Rosina (Rose) Otte
Dakin, who was called Grand). I’d bet
the incidents recounted in Resemblance
were actual events in the Williams family when the nascent writer was a child. (In fact, Lyle Leverich describes similar
incidents in his 1995 biography, Tom: The
Unknown Tennessee Williams.) Tom (Mickey
Theis), obviously named for Thomas Lanier Williams III, the writer’s birth
name, and his older sister and only real friend, Roe (Juliet Brett), recalling Williams’s
own beloved sister, are also playmates, making up all kinds of esoteric games
like the Stations of the Cross. But Roe
is preoccupied with her piano lessons with Miss Alley (Kristen Adele) and the
recital her teacher has organized for her and this irks Tom. (Piano and additional music for Resemblance are by Jana Mainelli.) Miss Alley has also arranged for young,
handsome Richard Miles (Brian Cross), her prize pupil who’s come back for a
visit, to partner with Roe on the violin.
This annoys Tom, but it also unnerves Roe, for the young girl is growing
up and Tom feels she’s leaving him behind.
During one of their games, Roe screams and Tom sees that there’s blood running
down her leg—though he doesn’t understand what it means—and Roe runs off in
fright, ordering her little brother not to follow her. At the same time, Roe is beginning to act
erratically and finds she’s no longer able to play her music, developments that
confound her mother (Megan Bartle) and grandmother (Liv Rooth). (The play doesn’t specify, but theatergoers
familiar with Williams’s history will know that Rose suffered from schizophrenia
starting in her teens, ultimately being institutionalized for the rest of her
life after a lobotomy in 1943—eight years before Williams published the story.)
The title comes from Tom’s perception of
Richard’s ubiquitous violin case, which Roe always asks to carry to rehearsal
for him. Tom says that the case looks
like a coffin . . . for a baby or a doll.
It’s an eerie note to an already bittersweet story.

Tent Worms (1980) by Elizabeth Egloff (The Swan, 1990; and Peter Pan and
Wendy, 1997; Ether
Dome, 2011) is set in the present (updated from
Williams’s original, written in 1945) on the deck of a house on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts (where Williams spent a lot of time over the years, including the
summer of 1946 when he shared a cottage on Nantucket Island, south of
the Cape in Nantucket Sound, with Carson McCullers while she dramatized her
novel The Member of the Wedding
and he worked on Summer and Smoke). Billy (Derek Smith) and his wife, Clara (Rooth),
are spending the summer away from the turmoil of the city at their vacation
cottage. Billy is a writer and he
usually uses the freedom to work out on the deck while Clara relaxes. (They’ve never made friends of any of their
neighbors.) The marriage now seems
strained and Billy has become preoccupied with ridding the property of the tent
worms that have been building their webs in the cottage’s trees. When the play starts, Billy’s up in one of
the trees with a leaf-blower, making a racket while trying to wipe out the
parasites. He’s nearly—well, not really “nearly”—obsessed
with this, and Clara has taken up drinking as a defense. Clearly, there’s something more going on, and
a phone call from Billy’s doctor provides some answers. We only hear Clara’s frantic side of the
conversation (in the story, Williams lets us in on both sides), but it
indicates that Billy’s sick and probably dying—though we don’t learn from
what. Clara doesn’t think her husband
knows, but it’s evident he does, which may account for all his behavioral
aberrations. The couple, however, don’t
ever talk about this—or much of anything else.
Things are obviously getting direr and in a last act of desperation,
Billy decides to burn the creatures out, torching the tree and the deck,
terrifying Clara until the firefighters arrive and put the smoky blaze
out. This act leaves Clara distraught,
but Billy is unperturbed. (Egloff has
moved the action up to 2015, and Clara’s phone call is on a cell—but Billy
apparently writes on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, not a laptop or even
an electric machine. A reference to
Tennessee Williams sitting on a similar deck back in the ‘40s? It’s a curiosity.)

You Lied To Me
About Centralia by John Guare (The
House of Blue Leaves, 1971 and
1986, 1986 Tony nominee; Landscape of the Body; and Six
Degrees of Separation,
1990, 1991 Tony and Pulitzer nominee, Atlantic City, screenplay1982,
Oscar nominee) is the story of Jim, Laura’s gentleman caller from Glass
Menagerie, after leaving the Wingfield apartment after dinner that
night. Guare doesn’t say anything about
this (though the original story gives much the same account as Menagerie),
so you have to know Menagerie to recognize the narrative Jim (Theis)
tells his fiancée, Betty (Bartle), when they meet in the waiting room of St.
Louis’s Union Station. Set in 1937, You Lied recounts Jim’s meeting with
Betty after her return from a train trip to her rich uncle. She’d told him she was going to Centralia,
Missouri, so Jim wouldn’t know that she was going to ask her uncle for money to
make a down payment on a house she wants.
Jim had even waited for Betty at the wrong platform because of her
fib. She says she’s hungry, but he tells
her he’s already eaten, and related his evening at the home of Tom, his
co-worker at the shoe factory where they both work. Betty’s instantly alarmed. Tom’s something of an outcast and Jim and the
other workers call him “Nancy-Boy” for his effeminate ways after they
discovered he writes poetry on the tops of the shoe boxes. (Both of these details are facts of Williams’s
time as a young man when he took a job in the shoe factory where his father was
a travelling salesman. The aspiring poet
did write poems on the box tops and C. C. Williams called his son “Miss Nancy.”)
But Jim regrets his cruelty once he’s
gotten to know Tom, and he enjoyed the evening at Tom’s home, even dancing with
his slightly peculiar sister, Laura.
Betty’s immediately jealous. What
does this mean? Is Jim in love with this
Laura? Of course, Jim had told his hosts
that he was engaged to be married in a few weeks, and they said goodbye to him
in disappointment, but Jim seems to have picked up on something he doesn’t
quite understand yet, and I wondered if a marriage to conventional and self-centered
Betty would really work out. (She hadn’t
gotten the money from her rich uncle.
He’d already gotten them a wedding gift.)

Desire Quenched
by Touch (“Desire and the Black Masseur,” 1948) by Marcus Gardley (PEN/Laura Pels Award-winner;
. . . And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, 2010; Every Tongue Confess, 2010; and The Box: A Black Comedy, 2014), set in the massage room of a public bathhouse and the office of police
Detective Bacon in New Orleans in 1952, is disturbing in a different way
from Resemblance and it has an
especially gruesome ending. (I won’t reveal the ending, but I will note
that Leverich reports in Tom that the young Williams was fascinated with
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.) Yaegel
T. Welch is Grand, an African-American masseur at a public bathhouse in New
Orleans who’s being questioned by Smith’s
Bacon, an NOPD detective, over the mysterious disappearance of Grand’s most
frequent—and eccentric—client, John Skelley’s Burns. As Bacon interviews Grand—it’s not hostile at
first, although the detective believes the masseur is involved in Burns’s
vanishing—we see flashbacks of Grand’s increasingly sadomasochistic massages as
Burns begs for ever more punishing treatment until the masseur performs an act
so shocking it doesn’t seem to suit the play Gardley wrote. (In Williams’s original story, which he saw
as a tale of atonement, Grand is more in tune with the violence and the story
is more forthcoming about the pleasure a black man takes in abusing a white man
in the era of Jim Crow.)

Oriflamme (1974; retitled
from “The Red Part of a Flag,” 1944) by David Grimm (Measure for Pleasure, 2006; The Miracle at Naples, 2009; and Tales from Red Vienna, 2014) takes place on a hill in a park in St. Louis on a summer afternoon in
1939 where Anna (Rooth) has
fled to escape her stultifying life and encounters Rodney (Smith in an entirely different performance from his others
here). (Hilton Als, in his New Yorker
profile of Williams, asserts that Anna is a homage to Grand, the playwright’s maternal
grandmother, who died in 1944, for her “anarchic spirit.” I said Williams reused his bio for his
writing.) Anna, who could be a
reflection of Blanche Du Bois from Streetcar or Alma Winemiller from Summer
and Smoke and Eccentricities, has been feeling confined by her life,
especially her job at the local department store, so one afternoon she decides
to buy herself a scarlet silk evening dress—and then, to the shock of the
store’s staff, insists on wearing it out even though it’s “a dress for the
evening.” The dress gives her not only a
sense of freedom and sensuous delight, but frees her inner naughty girl, a
trait she has repressed since childhood.
Anna finds herself in the park, at the top of a hill, where she finds Rodney,
known as Hooch because of the flask he always carries in his pocket. (The character of Rodney was invented by
Grimm.) He’s sitting on the top of the
back of a wooden bench, his feet on the seat, reading a racing form. Rodney, as Anna prefers to call him at first,
is a vulgar, rough working man (a portrait, not so much of a prototype of
Stanley Kowalski, but Cornelius Coffin Williams, the writer’s abusive father) and
he spots confused and conflicted Anna in her slinky, provocative red dress, as
a potential conquest. He plies her with
booze and insidiously chats her up. She
recounts many incidents from her past and her regrets and wishes, until Rodney
moves in for the clinch. She reacts with
instant fear and anger at Rodney’s presumption of intimacy and Rodney leaves in
a frustrated huff. As he departs, Anna
gives a little cough into her hand, revealing a large spot of blood, and we see
that she’s probably quite sick. (In the
story, Williams reveals Anna’s fatal condition early, but in the play it’s not
foreshadowed. In fact, the story makes
clear that Anna will die before the day’s out, but Grimm leaves her fate
uncertain.)

The Field of Blue
Children (1939; originally written in 1928, when Williams was still a teenager) by Rebecca Gilman (Pulitzer and Olivier
Awards nominee; Spinning into Butter, 2000; Boy
Gets Girl, 2000; and The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 2005)
updates the writer’s story to today and makes it a comedy of sexual awakening
and suppressed desires from Williams original contemplative tale of a conformist
college sorority sister who secretly yearns for more. Set on and around the campus of the
University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Layley (Bartle) is taking a poetry class
to learn how to say things she thinks in better, more expressive ways. She’s inarticulate (though not actually
stupid, as hinted by her own joke about her sorority, “Tri Delt”: “They’re so stupid that they only knew one
Greek letter. So they repeated it three
times: Delta Delta Delta”) so all she can say to the class’s best poet, Dylan (Skelley),
is that she likes his poems. But she’s
attracted to more than Dylan’s poetry and she meets him at a coffee house for a
poetry reading, foregoing the popular kids’ big after-game party for the
homecoming football game with Ole Miss, ’Bama’s traditional rival. Walking though the park after the reading,
she and Dylan have a sexual encounter, invited by Layley, which is played
hilariously for all its serious implications.
(Okay. After removing Layley’s
panties at her suggestion, Dylan puts his head up under her dress and Layley
goes off increasingly loudly, like Meg Ryan’s Sally in the famous delicatessen
scene in When Harry Met Sally . . .
.) But both Dylan and Layley have
significant others, his a somewhat militant and aggressively intellectual black
student named Meaghan (Adele) and hers the conventional “perfect” upper-crust
frat boy, Grant (Cross), but neither Dylan nor Layley are happy with their
partners. (Grant is as emptyheaded as
the sorority girls, the kind of guy, if this weren’t set in 2015, you’d expect
to come bounding into the house, asking, “Tennis, anyone?” And Meaghan is as narrow-minded and dismissive
in her way as the puffballs of fraternity and sorority row are assumed to be.) Layley’s sorority sisters, Cee Cee (Brett)
and Curry (Rooth), are as bubbleheaded, vacuous, and judgmental as their
stereotypes are expected to be—but in ways silly enough to be funny more than
mean. Both Dylan and, especially, Layley
ultimately feel compelled to stay within their social and self-defined bounds
and after Layley delivers an unintended surprise, the two students who might
have made a great pair if they broke their self-constructed bonds walk away
from one another into the predictable future that Layley, in particular, has
already laid out for us.

I liked the physical production
very much. The basic set for Desire, designed by Jeff Cowie, is the
same through the whole evening, with a few set pieces added to set the scenes
for each play (or each location for the few multi-scene plays). The main piece of scenery is an abstract tree
on stage right, really an assemblage of yellow-ish painted boards forming a
trunk and branches at the top, disappearing into the fly space. Tom and Roe in Resemblance sit in it and pose in the branches and Billy is hidden
among its branches with his leaf-blower when Tent Worms opens. Up stage,
across the back of the set, is a wooden wall made of weathered gray boards
(very reminiscent of traditional structures on Cape Cod and the islands), but
the boards are put together in varying patterns rather than parallel straight
across the wall: there are patches that look like boarded-up windows and
vertical strips as well as horizontal ones.
It’s not representative, except that it’s a wooden wall. Is it the side of a barn? A garage?
A neighboring house? A
shack? We don’t really know.

The wall, however, also serves as
a projection screen, when Cowie’s slides and videos sometimes obliterate the
wood texture, sometimes superimpose another image over the wood texture. One of the most marvelous projections comes
in Resemblance when Richard Miles
rides in on his bicycle. First of all,
director Michael Wilson eschews an actual bike, using two actors to carry in
bicycle wheels, one in front of Brian Cross and one behind, while Miles paces
along in a meandering course across the stage.
(Sara Swanberg designed the show’s props.) It’s an extremely delightful and expressive
image, made more dramatic by the multiple projections of bike wheels on the
back wall, floating around like giant ping pong balls in slow motion. It’s a joyful and dreamlike picture and makes
clear why Roe, in her world of circumscribed behavior, is so intrigued with the
handsome Richard. Other projections were
less dynamic than the bicycle but no less expressive and revealing. The black-and-white photographic
representation of the railroad station interior in You Lied, for instance, reminiscent of old Penn Station in New York
City, was better than most CGI effects I’ve seen in movies—more evocative and
pointed, it’s both old (because it’s black and white and a period image) and
real (because it’s a photo, not a drawing or painting) at the same time.

Davis C. Woolard’s costumes not
only vividly set the time for each play, but the mood and personality of each
character. That scarlet silk gown Anna
wears in Oriflamme is a perfect
example—it tells Anna’s whole story in a visual. (It doesn’t hurt that Liv Rooth uses it as a
prop much the way a Restoration character might use a fan or a handkerchief. It speaks its own dialogue.) All the visual aspects of the production were
brought to life and energized by the lighting of Russel H. Champa (with an
assist from the cast, of course). In
fact, I have to add here that one of the greatest pleasures of this production
was that it was a true and pervasive ensemble, stretching not only to
all the members of the cast, which is usually what defines an ensemble
production, and, of course, to the director, but to each of the designers who
created elements of the show. (I don’t
know if the writers continued to participate in the creation of this production
once rehearsals started, but if they did, they had to be part of this
collaboration.) Everything fit too well
for it to have been accidental or good luck, even if Wilson were a theatrical
genius. Desire is an example of what can happen when artists of every field
work together with one another to create a performance. (If I’m wrong on this, if the Acting
Company’s Desire was merely the
result of a happy accident, I’d just as soon not hear about it. Leave me in my benighted ignorance. I’m happy here.)

Michael Wilson’s direction is both solid and sure-handed, as
well as appropriate for the circumstances of each playlet. (He’s had some experience with Tennessee
Williams material: The Red Devil Battery Sign, world première in 1996, and the 2011
revival of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop
Here Anymore. In 1999, as artistic
director of Connecticut’s Hartford Stage, Wilson launched a 10-year marathon of
Williams’s works, including the premières in 2003 of Now the Cats with
Jeweled Claws, The Palooka, and The One Exception.) First, his choice of cast, all nine members
of the ensemble, and of the design concept (with Cowie, Woolard, Champa, and
Gromada) are both excellent, well-tailored to each of the stories and their
varied circumstances. (I don’t know if
Wilson had a say in the selection of the six playwrights who made the
adaptations, but if he did, obviously along with Acting Company producer Margot
Harley and artistic director Ian Belknap, he deserves kudos for that as
well.) All of that, however, would have
come to naught if Wilson also hadn’t wielded a master director’s hand at
working with the actors, no matter how talented they are individually. He guided them all into characterizations
that perfectly fit the roles each actor plays in each adaptation, helping (or
allowing) each performer to create characters often so different from one
another that I wasn’t always able to detect immediately that they were the same
actors I’d just seen in another part. If
nothing else, Wilson made Desire a
showcase for excellent acting—not that I’d have expected anything less from the
Acting Company.

But the director did
do more. I covered some of the design
and production elements with which I was impressed when I wrote about the
physical production earlier so you know that there are some immensely clever
aspects to the staging that lend the perfect touch to several of the plays. (The bicycling sequences in Remembrance are one elegant example.) Some are subtle and some blatant, depending
on need and appropriateness. Either
Wilson is familiar with Williams’s concept of plastic theater (on which I’ve
blogged: see “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9
May 2012) or he succumbed to the pull of the idea because it’s embedded in
Williams’s writing, even his prose. His
work with the actors, though, is just admirable. Wilson’s not a show-off, but he’s decidedly
more than a traffic director. (I’ve seen
his work in Tina Howe’s Chasing
Manet, and Horton Foote’sThe Orphans’ Home Cycle and Old Friends—blog reports dated 30 April
2009, 25 and 28 February 2010, and 10 October 2013.) I could see his hand in each play,
determining the performance style while still remaining true to the Williams
dynamic that underlies each adaptation. Of
course, in this Wilson had to collaborate with the actors and the writers, but
the director’s the final ringmaster. I
must, however, make a special mention of the acting in Resemblance, especially the work of Juliet Brett as Roe and Mickey
Theis as Tom. Both 20-something actors
play children—Roe’s a ’tween or young teen on the verge of puberty and Tom’s
still a little boy two years younger—without resorting to cliché or mugging;
the portrayals are mostly predicated on how well the characters understand what’s
happening to and around them, and that informs the rest of their behavior. (The moment Roe has her first period, Brett’s
Roe is terrified and Theis’s Tom is totally confused. She runs off in horror; he dithers in bewilderment.) As much as the success of that work depends
on the actors, it also has to rely on the sensitivity of the director—especially
to get the actors to work in tandem with one another.

It’s almost too hard to single out any performance as
exemplary. Not one portrayal was
lacking, even the incidental ones. If
there were caricatures, such as Layley’s sorority sisters in Blue Children, they were called for; if
there were emotional excesses, such as Anna’s in Oriflamme and Billy’s in Tent
Worms, they came from Williams’s stories—and they were all handled with
just the right touch to keep them within the world of Williams’s narrative. I must single out one of Derek Smith’s depictions:
Rodney (AKA “Hooch”) in Oriflamme. I said he’s the only actor on the bill who’s
name I recognized immediately, and even though he’s aged a bit since I saw him
at 26, I knew him as soon as he appeared on stage in Tent Worms. (The quality of
his work hadn’t changed, I must add.) He
was still recognizable, though displaying a different persona, as Detective
Bacon in Desire Quenched by Touch. But when the lights came up on Oriflamme and this guy was sitting up on
the back of the park bench, I had to check the program when the house light
came up again to find that this was the same actor I thought I knew. He not only looked different—that may have
been partly due to the costume since he didn’t wear heavy character makeup or
anything—but he was such a different person, even sounding different, I thought
it was one of the other cast members.
That’s all acting, not directing or writing, and it was very exciting
for an ex-actor to witness.

I’ve already written about Liv Rooth’s work in Oriflamme and Juliett Brett’s and Mickey
Theis’s in Resemblance. Another stand-out performance is given by
Yaegel T. Welch as Grand in Desire
Quenched, who appears stalwart and straightforward until we get to see him
in the flashbacks where we watch him mask a sadistic bent, fueled by a need for
payback, with an almost clinical detachment as Grand bends and manhandles Burns
in torturous ways as John Skelley’s Burns keeps begging for more. As an acting job, it’s an exercise in control
and objectification. If the grisly
ending doesn’t quite reconcile with the rest of the story or Welch’s character,
that’s more on Williams (and probably Marcus Gardley) than Welch.

The rest of the company, which, as I said, made up a
thoroughgoing ensemble, was first class and singling out a few doesn’t detract
from the overall high standards the actors set.
These guys were just plain terrific.

In the press, the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood wrote that the Desire playlets “often breathe
with the same fervent romanticism that marks [Williams’s] plays,” even as he
acknowledged, “Some are more successful than others.” Isherwood, however, was negative on the
question of “whether second-guessing [Williams] himself . . . is a fruitful
pastime.” the Timesman’s answer: “Over
all, on the evidence of this production, I’d have to say no.” In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer called the collection “consistently engrossing
and often ingenious” because she felt that “the playwrights . . . manage to
evoke vivid themes and shadows of Williams without a hint of overheated parody
or the loss of each individual voice.”
“Expertly directed,” asserted Winer, Desire
“made me yearn to read the stories.”

Jesse Green characterized Desire as “another in a series of theatrical misadventures that
makes you question the management of the Tennessee Williams estate,” dubbing
the stage adaptations “experiments in exploitation.“ Green stated, “I suppose I wouldn’t be
complaining about this if any of the experiments were ever any good, but
they’re not, and this latest one . . . is particularly annoying, like shaking
up a soda can full of tired Tennessee-isms, then popping the top and letting it
spray.” The New York reviewer went on to disparage the directing of Michael
Wilson, “who does not make a glorious showing here,” and the choice of stories,
which “feels fairly random.” Green
acknowledged that “the performances . . . are the only generally successful
elements of the endeavor.” In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer noted that “you can hear Tennessee Williams’s dramatis
personae echoing through this evening of one-acts based on his short stories .
. . . Sometimes these echoes are the
best bits, as several of the adaptations are merely workmanlike.”

In Time Out New York,
David Cote felt that “each playlet is both equal homage to a master and playful
riff on a source” and that Desire “is
satisfying in small, intense doses.”
Cote observed that “these stories are not subtle in their literary
devices or symbolic gestures, and the plays are most interesting when the
authors mitigate such flamboyant, combustible material with their own voice and
vision.” The man from TONY added that Wilson “directs an
appealing, uniformly good ensemble” and concluded, “Most American playwrights
working today owe some debt to Williams; it’s a pleasure, even inspiring, to
see six give back.”

The Huffington
Post’s David Finkle thought that adapting the Williams stories was a “wonderful
idea” which Wilson directed “capably.”
He ended by acknowledging, “An added attraction of Desire .
. . is that it makes reading or re-reading the short stories from which the six
plays are derived a temptation too strong to resist.” On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman stated that the playlets “have been given mainly fine,
often better than that, dramatic shape and form” by the adapters and are “all
intentionally intoxicating” and have been “rhapsodically and on occasion
rambunctiously staged .” Saltzman
concluded, “Though this collection will be most fulfilling for Williams
devotees it will also entertain” others.
Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller asserted that the adaptations in
Desire range “from seamless translation from short story to play, to
intriguing joining of Williams with the adaptor, to some of that unfortunate
veering into caricature.” Miller also
praised the “very solid cast” and the “excellent scenic and projection design.”

Marina Kennedy proclaimed
on Broadway World that the stories in
Desire have been “brilliantly adapted
for the stage” and display “extraordinary direction” which area “audiences will
not want to miss.” “Each and every scene
in Desire is entrancing,” Kennedy said, and the cast is “multi-talented.” On TheaterMania,
Zachary Stewart declared of Desire, “As
with most evenings of one-acts, the results are hit-and-miss.” John Gromada’s music is “dreamy,” said
Stewart, “Russell H. Champa's lighting is similarly otherworldly,” while “Director
Wilson exhibits a remarkable range.” The
one-act plays in Desire “offer a
fascinating lesson in the art of adaptation,” wrote Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater.